Dostoevsky’s Travels and Tripping with Zhirinovsky

Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski. Program runs approx. 97 mins. Digital projection.

Dostoevsky’s Travels (1991, 52 mins). A literature-inspired travelogue like From Moscow to Pietushki, Dostoevsky’s Travels is a unique hybrid documentary road movie in which Pawlikowski follows Dimitri Dostoevsky, a tram driver in Leningrad and the great-grandson of the author of Crime and Punishment, his only surviving descendant. Together they travel to post-reunification Germany, looking back at the artistic legacy of Dimitri’s celebrated ancestor, while simultaneously anticipating the future in a newly capitalist Eastern Europe.

Followed by: Tripping with Zhirinovsky (1995, 45 mins). A surreal boat trip down the Volga with the Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who had emerged as a media celebrity following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, wielding a brand of anti-Western ultranationalist populism of a sort that has become eerily familiar in the years since Pawlikowski’s film was made. 博物馆入场免费。